From the bestselling authors of Black Mass comes the definitive
biography of Whitey Bulger, the most brutal and sadistic crime boss
since Al Capone.
Drawing on a trove of sealed files and previously classified material,
Whitey digs deep into the mind of James J. "Whitey" Bulger, the crime
boss and killer who brought the FBI to its knees. He was an American
original --a psychopath who fostered a following with a frightening mix
of terror, deadly intimidation and the deft touch of a politician who
often helped a family in need meet their monthly rent. But the history
shows that despite the early false myths portraying him as a Robin Hood
figure, Whitey was a supreme narcissist, and everything--every
interaction with family and his politician brother Bill Bulger, with
underworld cohorts, with law enforcement, with his South Boston
neighbors, and with his victims--was always about him. In an
Irish-American neighborhood where loyalty has always been rule one, the
Bulger brand was loyalty to oneself.
Whitey deconstructs Bulger's insatiable hunger for power and control.
Building on their years of reporting and uncovering new Bulger family
records, letters and prison files, Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill examine
and reveal the factors and forces that created the monster. It's a
deeply rendered portrait of evil that spans nearly a century, taking
Whitey from the streets of his boyhood Southie in the 1940s to his cell
in Alcatraz in the 1950s to his cunning, corrupt pact with the FBI in
the 1970s and, finally, to Santa Monica, California where for fifteen
years he was hiding in plain sight as one of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted.
In a lifetime of crime and murder that ended with his arrest in June
2011, Whitey Bulger became one of the most powerful and deadly crime
bosses of the twentieth century. This is his story.
